There’s been some buzz lately about a password-free future, and thanks to Alex Smolen, an engineer at twitter, the future is now. Alex has released NoPassword, a rails engine that gives you authentication without passwords.

Late last week Michal Papis announced the release of RVM 1.16. One of the most exiting new features here is the addition of binary Ruby installs. This new version of RVM also now has improved security, a new rvm reinstall process, and improved zsh compatibility, amongst other small improvements.

Need to test out prototypes in production without touching your main code base? Maybe just to a subset of your users? Then you might want to check out Chili, a Ruby Gem by Jens Balvig. Chili is built on top of Rails Engines and uses Deface to conditionally override your existing views, while leaving your original code untouched.

On Friday Sergey Nartimov wrote up a post on speeding up your JSON rendering in Rails… In the article he walks through an example showing how he brings the rendering time in his example from 6 seconds down to .6 seconds.